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“I observe that when we mention any great number, such as a thousand, the mind has generally no adequate idea of it, but only a power of producing such an idea by its adequate idea of the decimals, under which the number is comprehended.” Stanislas Dehaene, The Number Sense: how the mind creates mathematics (Oxford 2d ed. 2011) at 79, quoted David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, and set me to agreeing.

We can’t grasp 10,000 very well (one quarter of the attendees at Citifield?) let alone one million dollars. Evolutionary psychologists would say that homo sapiens on the great plains of Africa did not need to count above a few score, so our brains never evolved to cope with numbers a thousand or more times bigger. Perhaps decimals help some people. Probably, though, most of us toss around large numbers – GDPs in the trillions, revenues in the billions, fees in the millions – but aren’t really comfortable with the magnitude of numbers at those scales.

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At 219 claimed participants in the 2011 HBR consulting metrics report, the number has dropped, since press releases in the past make much of increases (See my post of Oct. 20, 2010: HildebrandtBakerRobbins press release stated 10% increase in participants.). (There is no mention of what number of those 219 completed only the compensation portion.)

In fact, last year’s report had 252 companies, so the loss of 31 leaves one wondering about the causes of the 15 percent decline.

Maybe it’s the hefty cost? Law departments without deep pockets can’t afford two or three thousand dollars for a survey that averages only 10 companies per industry. Maybe it’s the labyrinthine survey instrument? Managers may elect not to devote the man-hours to trying to complete, estimate, or flat out guess at the numbers. Maybe it reflects organizational disarray? The tumult and disorder of being flung out of Thomson Reuters probably took its toll. Maybe modest-sized law departments, which means nearly everyone out there, don’t find data from giant large departments compelling, nor are they wowed by 11 digit revenue ($10B and above)?

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Some bias comes built into these results since 70 percent of 54 departments responding to a recent survey belong to the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA). ILTA’s 2011 Law Department Technology Survey gathered data in December 2010. It found that for legal departments with 50 or more attorneys, 78 percent reported that their departments have their own, dedicated IT group, as compared to relying on corporate IT.

The advantages of employ-your-own include more control over how IT staff spend their time, perhaps better quality because you select them yourself, and better knowledge of the law department because they are housed there full time. If the IT department charges for its support, the cost might be about the same. The downsides, though, include that there can be an us-versus-them feeling sometimes, there is no career path inside the legal department, and the position can be insular.

Advantages of relying on corporate IT staff include more resources behind them and greater familiarity with the infrastructure and standards of the company. The disadvantages include periodic rotations so that just when they have learned a fair amount they whisk off to another assignment. Also, they may have limited knowledge of or interest in legal department technology. Further, who can effectively manage someone else’s staff and agenda?

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QR (Quick Response) codes are everywhere these days. A QR code (in effect a barcode for mobile phones) will link to a piece of text, a phone number, an SMS message or URL.

Law department lawyers will increasingly see them in publications. For vendors and law firms the URL is probably the most useful option as it allows them to link to a chunk of material, such as case studies, background information or other forms of sales and marketing collateral, that there isn’t space for in an ad. But URLs are awkward to enter for smart phone users. So, QR codes are also starting to crop up, such as on business cards as they can provide links to supplemental information. Further, As long as the URL that the QR code links to remains the same, the web content can be updated and revised as frequently as required.

I read about QR codes in Charles Christian;s Legal Technology Insider and borrowed heavily from his write up for this post. I even tried my own QR for this blog.

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Astonishing news, this. Bloomberg announced yesterday that five partners (partners!) from Willkie Farr & Gallagher will become part of the existing Bloomberg legal team, effective January 1, 2012. One of them, Dick DeScherer, will become Chief Legal Officer.

I can’t fathom the economics and logic of this massive move. Here is the bland statement in the release. “As a growing company operating in almost 200 locations around the world, we are finding unprecedented opportunities for growth in our customer base, our product offerings and our local partners. Bloomberg will benefit greatly from a ramp-up of both the number and range of expertise of in-house legal staff to ensure we are much more efficient and nimble as we seek to take advantage of these global opportunities” said Bloomberg CEO Daniel L. Doctoroff.

The release adds that “Willkie Farr & Gallagher has been Bloomberg’s primary outside legal counsel since 1987 and DeScherer has worked with the company during the same time period, serving on the Bloomberg Board of Directors for more than 25 years — a role he will continue.”

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If you are the head employment lawyer for EMEA and are promoted to global employment lawyer, certainly your scale of responsibility expands. You have more people reporting to you, a larger budget, more locations to visit, additional laws and regulations to consider, but you are essentially doing the same things in the same area of law although writ larger. Demands are more, but of a like kind.

By contrast, if you are the top corporate litigator and are selected to become the general counsel, your scale certainly enlarges, but far more significantly your scope grows dramatically. Your job involves new activities of qualitatively larger breadth and complexity, such as shareholder meetings, boards of directors, corporate governance concerns, public relations, and being the icon of the legal function.

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Scrupulous surveyors know that if one person answers all the questions, the methodological concern for “response bias” lurks. Better data comes from multiple sources. Rather than have only the administrator of a legal department, for example, answer questions about practices in a law department – numeric answers are not as vulnerable to deliberate or unintentional skewing – different parts should be completed by different people. Sometimes referred to as “same source bias,” it makes the results less reliable.

This presents problems more when the questions have to do with qualitative answers, such as “To what degree do your internal clients bring your lawyers in on time?’ and less when questions concern countable, confirmable numbers, such as “How many bankruptcy cases were pending at the end of the year?”

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Part of Pfizer’s arrangements with its Alliance firms are evaluations of those firms. According to the ACC Docket, July/Aug. 2011 at 80, Pfizer lawyers are supposed to go online to complete evaluation forms, which include an opportunity to write in comments.

In my experience, evaluations by in-house lawyers of their firms often fall flat. Either the lawyers simply don’t do them or they do them half-heartedly: no specifics, no recommendations, no value. Probably they believe they vote with their feet – if they didn’t think well of the services of the firm, aside from situations where a particular firm is foisted on them, they walk away and stop sending the firm work. Written evaluations, they complain, are too rigid, too late, too time consuming, and too sensitive.

On another level, it could be that the reason both firm evaluations and knowledge management efforts peter out is that lawyers don’t want to have their individual judgments splashed out for all to see (and, more to the point, to criticize). It is safer to hang back, not participate, and avoid personalized scrutiny. Because of the same trepidation, people don’t offer contrarian views or new ideas; they self-protectively mold their answers on employee morale or three-sixty degree assessments; they like the cautious, collective decision-making of teams – fear of standing out pervades.

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Why is “bet the company litigation” (aka “bet-the-company litigation”) consistently among the most popular search terms for those who arrive at my blog? On October 26th I looked on SiteMeter under Referring Search Words Ranked by Visits. Number one (13 searches) was the unhyphenated version and number seven (8 searches) was the hyphenated form.

I have used the terms a few times in posts, mostly with criticisms attached (See my post of Dec. 5, 2005: an estimate of fees spent in the UK; Feb. 28, 2006 chastising the over-use of term; April 27, 2008: big suits not suitable for AFAs; Jan. 18, 2009: some data on stock price effects of law suits; April 1, 2009: data from another study on median damages; June 17, 2009: legal risks much less important than operational and financial; July 28, 2009: girdle-the-globe transactions and bet-the-company litigation as blue moon events; and April 9, 2010: rare events.).

The popularity of the term may because it is an idiom, and non-litigators don’t know what it refers to: what I might term prevail-or-wail lawsuits.

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“Increasingly, professional errors – across fields and disciplines – stem not from lack of ability or ignorance, but from ineptitude: situations in which ‘the knowledge exists, yet we fail to apply it correctly.’” In-house counsel should heed this observation, and its follow-on recommendation: use checklists.

Checklists have a “forcing function” that pushes uses to follow the minimum steps in a process. The degree of determination can be like a recipe, in that you follow the steps, or like a picture for a jigsaw puzzle where you can complete the process however you like but you need confirmation of its sufficiency. Checklists can also encourage “pause points” where the lawyer ought to stop and check with other lawyers or clients.

The quote and ideas about two basic functions of checklists comes from Legal Comm. & Rhetoric, Fall 2011 at 96, which quotes from Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (Metro Bks. 2009) at 8. As to checklists more generally (See my post of Jan. 26, 2010: checklists with 9 references.).